False Confessions at Guantanamo

Wrongful conviction cases often follow similar patterns, and all of the warning signs have been present at Guantanamo for years. A federal judge’s decision unsealed last week demonstrates exactly how innocent people have become American captives and the lengths our government is willing to go to obtain false convictions.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered that a Kuwaiti man named Fouad al-Rabiah (left) be freed from Guantanamo, finding that we’ve detained an innocent man for seven years based on false confessions extracted under torture. Her 65-page opinion completely eviscerates the government’s case against al-Rabiah, explaining that American authorities ignored warning signs of his innocence in order to stick to the original story. Blogger and author Andy Worthington gives us an excellent play-by-play review of the frightening case here.

The case is an eye-opening example of the kind of injustice that can occur when we let fear and revenge get the best of our justice system. It’s a deadly recipe: a suspect with some scant circumstantial evidence of involvement meets pressure to get a conviction. We see it again and again in domestic cases. About 25% of the wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing to date have involved false confessions.

Al-Rabiah’s wrongful incarceration follows the same pattern of many of the domestic wrongful convictions, except the interrogation techniques used by the officers (and approved by the Bush administration) were infinitely more aggressive and unjust than any used regularly in American police stations since Jon Burge’s reign of terror on Chicago’s South Side in the 1970s and 1980s.

Below are the facts in al-Rabiah’s case as I understand them:

Al-Rabiah says he was in Afghanistan volunteering his time as an aid worker in 2001 when he was captured by Americans. The U.S. government, on the other hand, alleges that he was a ‘devotee of Osama bin Laden who ran to bin Laden’s side after September 11th.’ Two extremely unreliable witnesses allegedly implicated Al-Rabiah as an al-Qaeda operative. Those witnesses have been debunked.

On this evidence, al-Rabiah spent seven years in Guantanamo, and gradually his questioning grew harsher. He was deprived of sleep by being moved every two hours for more than four days. He was subjected to other “aggressive interrogation tactics” that aren’t described in the judge’s decision, but we can assume, based on what we know of other cases, that they weren’t pretty.

Al-Rabiah began to make some coerced admissions -- inconsistent and impossible accounts of meeting Osama bin Laden and involvement with al Qaeda. His interrogators were frustrated with him because it was clear he wasn’t telling the truth. His own interrogators, and a CIA analyst who reviewed the investigation, have said they didn’t believe he was telling the truth. Still, the government detained him.

Kollar-Kotelly granted his habeas corpus petition to set him free, because the government is holding him without sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing. Al-Rabiah's attorney David Cynamon said it best in an email to Worthington:

Thank God, though, that we have an independent judiciary. The importance of the writ of habeas corpus and independent judges has never been more clear.

Here’s more from the AP and Reason Magazine.